Nature Notes: Fowl Feathered Friends
The black and scarlet oaks with their lobed and pointed leaves may be on the way to becoming live oaks, the ones in the South and California that never lose their leaves in the fall and are, thus, evergreens. It will take thousands of years for such a conversion, but global warming may shorten that time span a bit. We’ll see.
While the leaves have yet to completely fall from the deciduous trees, shrubs, and subshrubs, the asters and goldenrods have pretty much finished blooming and colored flower heads have been replaced with gray-white fruit containing the tiny plumose seeds ready for takeoff. Asters are in the sunflower family. While some sunflowers produce large seeds that don’t float but drop to the ground, like the ones humans and birds eat, the large majority of them use the wind to disperse their seeds.
While the last act of fall is about to open, northern breeding birds have been setting up winter territories. White-throated sparrows, juncos, kinglets, and the like, just down from the north, are returning to last year’s feeding tables hoping they will be up and just as fruitful. The sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks are also back and on their tails. They know how to navigate the feeding station trails as well as you know how to get from your house to McDonald’s or the post office.
The most spectacularly showy of our feathered friends that are turning up here and there as they set in from the north are the waterfowl. They are the puddle ducks, scoters, mergansers, geese, and, if we are lucky, the tundra swans. The ducks and geese retain their colorations through plumage changes. The duller loons and grebes lose their nuptial feathers, which are replaced by gray, black, and white winter ones.
Hook Pond, that troubled bit of freshwater in East Hampton Village behind the ocean dunes, is the pond that annually has the biggest assortment of waterfowl each winter because it is not only rich in pond weeds of many different species but it is also a safe haven; hunting is not allowed in the village.
The little stream that Dell Cullum (a contributing photographer for The Star) is writing about, photographing, and filming almost daily and which begins at a culvert outlet on Fithian Lane just south of Montauk Highway, is a favorite with local families and their children because several species of ducks as well as turtles and muskrats depend on their charitable gifts of food. You are more likely to find wood ducks there than at any other local spot, but at times there is quite an array, particularly of the non-diving ducks — the mallard, black duck, teal, and so on.
You will occasionally find a Peking duck. The famous white mallard was first cultivated in China, then later elsewhere around the world, including New York State, where its name was changed to the Long Island duck. It was such a big thing here that local entrepreneurs in Flanders built a giant store that looks like a duck, but doesn’t quack. It is right behind the Montauk Lighthouse in terms of annual visitors. Recently, under the auspices of the Peconic Estuary Program, a rain garden was added to the property to keep nitrates and other runoff chemicals out of the Peconics.
Some of the sea ducks are just as colorful as the pond ducks. The red-breasted merganser, or shelldrake, the American goldeneye, the long-tailed duck, or old-squaw, and bufflehead are colorful and even comical above the water and swift and slick swimmers when feeding underwater. The scoters, or coots, the surf, white-winged, and black ducks are not colorful, but their long skeins flying low over the sea, even in the most tumultuous of times, are sights to behold. They are looking for the next mussel bed or some other shellfish collection to feed on. The duck hunters that “line out” in a string of boats to shoot them, don’t eat them, but must enjoy them as much as I do.
My favorite sea duck is the goldeneye because the males not only have a glossy green head, but when both sexes fly, their wings whistle and can be heard coming from a long way off. On the North Fork we called them “whistlers.” Two ducks that are rarities locally but can be found if you look long and hard are the canvasback and redhead. The males of both are redheaded. They are half sea duck and half puddle duck; they prefer feeding in freshwaters, but they dive as skillfully as the sea ducks. Otter Pond has one or more canvasbacks each winter while Big Reed Pond in Montauk is a favorite spot for the redhead.
Two other rarities locally are the pintail, the male of which has a long tail, longer than the tail of a long-tailed duck, and the gadwall, a black duck look-alike, but with a gray back instead of a brown one.
The pintail is a very fast flyer, like the canvasback and a hard duck. The similar plumage of the male and female gadwall and black ducks make them the only two local species where it’s hard to tell male from female.
To return to Hook Pond — some say it is in trouble — there are some ducks in it that always show up in the annual January waterfowl count, but rarely elsewhere locally: the common merganser and the hooded merganser. Fort Pond in Montauk is a second spot to find the green-headed common merganser. Mergansers have serrated bills, are fast underwater swimmers, and pursue fish for food. Those sharp little points, or serrations, on the edges of the beak hold onto a fish when it is snapped up and before it is swallowed whole.
As far as showiness goes, my favorite ducks looks like a large male mallard with an exaggerated Donald Duck bill. It’s the shoveler, which uses that oversized flattened bill to suck up subsurface pond vegetation and the organisms found in it in vacuum-cleaner fashion. You’re apt to find this one in Sagg Pond or Mecox Bay.
The American widgeon, or baldpate, is a nondescript puddle duck smaller than a mallard with a white forehead, and it’s always very busy dabbling when on the surface of a pond. It’s a very rapid and maneuverable flyer, like the blue-winged and green-winged teal, two of our smallest waterfowl, which wheel and deal when flying from the hunters’ raised guns. You may be lucky enough to find a Eurasian teal, which is reddish brown in color, unlike any other duck in these parts.
The ruddy duck is ruddy like its name. It’s a little bigger than a teal, has a tail that points up not out, hangs out in large flocks, and dives for its food. It invariably inhabits Wainscott Pond in the late fall, winter, and early spring, when it’s not frozen over. The pond is owned by the East Hampton Town Trustees as are Georgica and Hook Ponds, but it is surrounded by private landowners and is not easy to access. Maybe that’s why the ruddies like it so much.
The scaup, colloquially the bluebill or broadbill, was once the most common of the diving ducks in Long Island waters, especially in the Great South Bay and the other bays and coastal ponds situated behind the barrier beach and the ocean dunes between the Rockaways and Hook Pond. There are two species, greater, with a green head, and lesser, with a purplish head. They were the favorites of the south bays’ duck hunters, as they were good eating and could be drawn to decoys by hunters waving a white flag, before ducking back down into the blind as the ducks approached. They are curious. Now they are scarce.
Two closely related ducks are the ringnecked and tufted ducks. These two species can often be found in proximity to scaup. Big Reed Pond in Montauk and Shorts Pond on the north side of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton are two spots to look for the ringneck, the more common of the two.
The two ducks with the finest and warmest feathers of all are the eiders, king and common. They are diving sea ducks like the scoters and two arctic species, along with the seals, that are exceptions to the global warming trend. They move a little bit farther south each year. Indeed, they have already bred on Fisher’s Island, and one can see the brown juveniles hanging around in small flocks among the surfers near Montauk Point in the middle of summer.
Having mentioned Montauk Point, I can’t leave out the most exquisitely colored sea duck of all, the harlequin. Every other winter or so, a pair will take up residence just off the point, where they dive for their food among the large glacial erratics. When I was at Southampton College a pair used to set up in the Shinnecock Inlet near the rock jetties every December and January, as well. The college is gone, so are the harlequins.
Everyone knows the Canada goose. Some are here all year round and, like the mallard and the mute swan, are common breeders here. They were very scarce when I was a boy, but now they rank among the most numerous species on Long Island waterfowl counts. There is a smaller subspecies, the Richardson’s goose, that is identical in appearance and is frequently found among them in fields and coastal ponds. Every year we get some blue geese, usually the white morph of the species, the snow goose. They have a distinctly different honk and you are more apt to see them or hear them flying over than see them on land or in a pond. We are also visited by the barnacle goose and very, very rarely by the Ross’s goose, a half-size goose that, if found locally, is bound to attract a crowd.
The tundra swan, or whistling swan, is my favorite of all. Most of them go to the Southwest for winter, but each year we get a small complement of four or more. And where do you think they choose to hang out between here and Riverhead? In that troubled Hook Pond. You can occasionally find one of these pure white swans in the fields feeding beside Canada geese. They are grazers when on land, dabblers when in the water. They are a bit smaller than our common mute swan, the Eurasian species that has established itself in the eastern United States for 135 years or so and the one that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Audubon Society are hell-bent on getting rid of.
The mute swan is the real whistling swan, but it is almost “dumb” vocally. When it flies you can hear its low whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh from a quarter mile away. It pretty much stays in the water, except when it nests on land along a shore. It uses its long neck to reach down two to four feet underwater to feed on rooted pond flora. The male and female form a near monogamous pair and raise and protect their young for almost a year after they hatch. But, finally, they can no longer put up with them, so they push them away, at times, forcibly. Hmm . . . not unlike we humans at times.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].